


The Art of Running

by pprfaith



Series: Running [1]
Category: Fast and the Furious (2001), Fast and the Furious Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Genderswap, Injury, Kink Meme, Romance, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-04
Updated: 2011-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-24 07:42:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first question to ask any runner: 'Are you running from, or toward?' Or: The life of a girl named Brian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Running

**Author's Note:**

> Kink Meme fill that asked for genderswapped Brian. I delivered. A lot.
> 
> Have fun!

+

 **The Art of Running**

+

“Are you sure you can do this, O’Conner?” Tanner asks, worriedly squinting from behind his glasses. As if they haven’t had this conversation before. As if there’s anyone else who could successfully infiltrate a gang of racers.

As if the whole precinct isn’t talking about ‘O’Conner’s crazy driving’ and juvie record anyway. Apparently ‘sealed’ doesn’t actually mean shit among cops.

So everyone knows Officer O’Conner used to boost cars for fun, take them on joyrides and usually leave them in ditches. Busted. Two years juvie. Doesn’t get more real than that.

Doesn’t get more suited for the job than that.

“Yes, sir. I’m sure.”

Tanner nods and his squint eases marginally and he smiles wanly, waving a hand at the door, “Then go get’em, girl.”

+

Brianna Marilyn O’Conner – _call me Brian, or it’ll be your blood on the floor_ – isn’t nearly as sure about this as she pretends to be for Tanner’s sake.

She can do this, of that she has no doubt. The shit she got busted for back in Barstow was only the tip of the iceberg of what she actually _did_. The racing, the stealing, the crime. The lies and the thrill and the adrenaline rush that’s like nothing else on this planet.

She’s the best person for this job.

The problem is, after juvie, after two years in hell with not even Rome to keep her company, she swore off all that. And after her mom died, she actually stuck with the plan, too. No more thrills. No more joyrides. No more heart in her throat and life on the edge.

From street racer to traffic cop. It doesn’t get much more anticlimactic than that. These days, the biggest rush she can hope for is a domestic call, and even those are usually drab compared to what life was like once upon a time.

And she’s okay with that. She calmed down, got her life straight. Once Rome gets out of Chino, she’ll set him straight, too, and they’ll lead boring, but safe lives and she’ll be able to forget she ever knew what flying felt like.

Only now here’s the job, undercover in the racing scene, everything she weaned herself off like a junkie going cold turkey, dangled right in front of her.

She can do the job.

But she’s kind of scared what it’ll do to her in return.

+

She’s twenty when she leaves it all behind.

Rome drives her to the bus station, his silence icy, angry, hurt. He doesn’t understand why she’s doing this, throwing her life away. Throwing _him_ away.

She doesn’t have the energy to explain anymore.

Her mother is dead. She’s dead and the last thing she ever said to Brian was, “You be good, Brianna”

She always said that, a million times. Every time she left, every time Brian fucked up again, got in trouble again. Her mother is dead and half the reason for that is all the shit her daughter heaped on her.

 _You be good_.

She never was while her mom was alive, never cared. Even post-juvie, her attempts were half-assed. But now her mom is dead and she knows it’s hollow, but she’s gotta do something. Make it right. Make _anything_ right.

She can’t do that boosting cars and racing, can’t do that as a criminal. But being a cop is about as far from being a criminal as you can get without becoming a saint, so Brian figures she’ll try. She’ll leave all this behind, get her ass on the straight and narrow and she’ll try. For her mother, and for herself.

“This isn’t about you, man,” she tells Rome as he coasts to a halt at the bus station, still staring fixedly out the window.

“It’s still shit,” he says, and the fact that that’s all he says is telling. He’s hurt. Because she’s leaving behind the life and Rome is part of that life and yeah, shitty move on her part.

She runs a hand through her chopped off hair, sighs, leans into him. He tries to shrug her off, but she doesn’t budge. “I love you, Rome,” she says and fuck sticking to the guy-code, fuck the manly silences. She’s got ovaries, and just this once, she’ll act like it. “I love you and I’m sorry, but this is something I gotta do, okay? I’ll call. I’ll visit. I’ll post bail for you.”

And then she pulls out the ultimate weapon: The Pout. “Please don’t be mad at me?”

He looks, only for half a second, but it’s enough. He looks and falls victim to The Pout. With a sigh and a grunt he twists his arm around and over her, hugging her close. She’ll have finger shaped bruises on her arm come morning, but she doesn’t mind.

“You be careful, Bri,” he mutters straight into her ear, “And don’t forget where you from, girl.”

“I won’t,” she promises.

Rome waits in the car until the bus pulls away.

+

She knows Toretto isn’t her way in. Can’t be. Brian is the kind of scrappy a bitch only gets from being a white girl with a black boy for a best friend, stirring up shit wherever they go, but Toretto could simply _break_ her. She doubts she could so much as make him budge if things went wrong.

His best friend isn’t much better and his girlfriend… well, Brian isn’t one to judge a book by its cover, but the Latina looks the kind of mean that comes with a fist, not a bitch slap. Hardcore.

So she figures she’ll have to either go for the sister, or one of the two other guys. The twitchy kid and the quiet one. Twitchy kid looks like someone she might get along with in real life, the life where she’s Brian, not Officer O’Conner. The quiet guy, too.

Maybe it’s a result of growing up with Rome for a best friend and being a tomboy, but she’s always been more comfortable around men than women.

Which is exactly why she picks the sister as her in.

If she doesn’t get comfortable, the siren’s song of the open road might not draw her in this time.

Here’s to hoping.

+

Connecting with Mia – who stops being Toretto’s sister about two days in and becomes _Mia_ \- is easy. Once Brian has the job at Harry’s, she can go for lunch at Mia’s place and bitch about the injustice of trying to make a living in a testosterone filled world and Mia hears her.

Just small talk the first week, a few smiles, a few shared groans here and there. The second week Mia starts asking how Brian’s day’s been so far, and tries to get her to eat something other than the crappy tuna.

Brian smiles, tells her, “It reminds me of my best friend. Guy can burn water, but he always made a mean sandwich.” Rome hates tuna, she doesn’t say, but he used to brave it for her, way back in Barstow, in his mother’s dingy kitchen. The memory tastes bittersweet and Mia doesn’t ask about it, just starts chattering.

By the third week they talk like old friends and Brian thinks that Mia might be lonely.

She thinks that she shouldn’t care about a mark’s sister, but that’s really hard when the younger woman smiles at her, says, “I like you, Brian. You’re not complicated.”

She shrugs in response, swallowing the last of her sandwich, “Few people are, if you get right down to it. We all want the same things, in the end.”

“Yeah? What do you want?”

My best friend out of Chino. My life as it was. The guys at the precinct to stop fucking wolf-whistling every time I walk past. A road that never ends. A family. A home. Peace. Freedom.

“Right now? A coffee to go would be great. Harry’s got me doing inventory. Again.”

+

“I’m not posting your bail this time, Brianna,” mom says and Brian is too stunned to react at all for a long second.

Then her mouth – sixteen and pretty much running all the time – takes over, “Mom! You can’t do that! You can’t let me rot in here!”

Her mom runs a hand over her tired face, smudging her cheap make-up. “Yes, I can. I am. At least this way, you can’t run away again.”

“I’ve never run away!” Brian snaps, feeling the urge to reach through the bars and strangle her mother. Goddamn holier than thou attitude. What the hell does the old bat know? It’s her fault that Brian’s stuck in this ass-backward town in the first place. Her and her shitty taste in men!

But then her mother does something she has never done before. She surprises Brian by yelling right back, “You’re always running! Every time you steal a car, or race, or get in a fight, you’re always running! And I have no idea why because no-one’s ever done anything to you!”

Years later Brian will understand that the edge she hears in her mother’s voice is desperation over her only daughter running rampant. But right then all she hears is more insults, more shit placed at her feet.

She turns away from the bars, crosses her arms over her chest and snarls without looking, “Fine. Leave me here. If I get gangraped, I’ll let you know.”

She stalks off, as far as she can get in her small holding cell and sits down on the rickety bench with jerky movements. Running. Okay, shit, maybe she is.

Maybe her mom’s right. But it’s not about running away, doesn’t she see that? Shit town, shit life, shit everything, but Brian’s not running away. She’s running toward something. The life she deserves, big money, big cars.

The good life.

The life she’ll have one day.

Freedom.

Brian O’Conner doesn’t run _away_ from anything.

+

The kid, Jesse, walks up to her one day, pupils blown, arms waving wildly. He leans in too close, licks his lips and says, very carefully, “Bee-ooti-ful!”

She laughs and can’t help patting his shoulder. He nods, smiles dopily and ambles away, still muttering the word, over and over.

Later, when he already knows her name, he still calls her that.

+

The best friend – Vince – is the next to make contact. He sits next to her one day, makes noise about her coming here every day for the tuna. No-one likes the tuna, he says, suspicion shining in his eyes.

“Mia’s good company,” Brian says with a shrug and a smile, just ditzy enough to go with her dumb blonde act.

The guy growls and if she had a dick, Brian’s pretty sure he’d be sucker punching her right about now.

Testy.

Sure, he’s right about her and all that, but still. Testy.

But she has no dick and so all he does is motion with two fingers and growl, “I’m watching you, Barbie.”

Brian smiles back vacantly and asks, sweet as anything, “Yeah? My tits or my ass?”

Mia chokes behind the counter and the few patrons around them fall silent as the big guy stares at her like she’s speaking Japanese. Somewhere behind him, Dominic Toretto laughs a laugh that sounds like a pack of attack dogs, wildly amused.

Vince stumbles away muttering and Mia leans across the counter to whisper, eyes still sparkling with mirth, “Knowing Vince? Both.”

+

After that, she sometimes exchanges a few words with them, Vince and Toretto. Hi, how you been, what’s up. Nothing special, but they seem to be getting used to her face.

Progress, she guesses, and that’s fine, because her racing, while not up to what it used to be, is decent enough for an intentional loss.

She spent days agonizing over whether a win or a loss would be a better introduction, but in the end it comes down to two things: One, Toretto doesn’t lose. Ever. And two, a good loser is usually more appreciated than a good winner. Racing is about two things, flash and pride.

You got cred, or you’re no-one. Toretto has a shitload of cred and losing to a girl would make him look weak. He’d probably drive her out of town just to restore his name.

But Brian’s a logical person. Cool, controlled. Laid-back, usually. It takes a lot to get her going for real. So she plans and she thinks and she works out the kinks in her head before making her move. Losing is okay if it’s part of some bigger plan.

She plans the race down to the last detail. How to approach Toretto, how to play him. How to bet her pink slip and lose and find a way to put herself into his debt. Some sort of deal, maybe, for her car, which is a butt-ugly lime green, but still _hers_ , even if Tanner got it out of the impound lot only a month ago. That kind of deal would give her an in.

Plans, plans, plans.

And then she gets in the car and Toretto’s engine rumbles next to hers and the world shrinks down to them and the quarter mile ahead and she forgets every single one of her plans.

Forgets that she means to lose, that this is a job, that she’s a cop, that she’s clean and straight, free of this shit. That she’s not a racer anymore. Forgets.

Her heartbeat in her ears, the road under her, thrumming with promise, and the needle edging in on the red. Siren song.

It’s everything she promised herself to never do again, everything she left behind.

It’s fucking exhilarating.

+

Hector tries to pick her up for about two minutes before laughing, shaking his head and dubbing her ‘Ice’. White and cold, he says.

She kind of likes it.

+

She loses the race against Toretto, which is kind of tied directly to the whole _doesn’t ever lose_ thing and pisses her off more than it should, seeing as how it’s part of her plan. But, damn, racing Toretto is a challenge, not like taking money from the hicks back in Barstow, not even like racing Rome, because no matter how badly he trash talks her, she never really gets riled up at him anymore.

They had this three week long affair when they were sixteen and since then, Roman Pearce and all his bullshit sticks to her like oil to Teflon.

But Toretto is good, really good. Dangerously good, she thinks, remembering the truckers’ descriptions of the crazy driving of the hijackers.

She puts that thought aside for when she’s not playing Brian Spilner and tries to get to the man instead, to talk him into letting her earn her car back. Only Letty, the girlfriend, seems to have tentacles and eyes in the back of her head, because every time Brian so much as twitches in Toretto’s direction, the Latina is there, ready to cut a bitch up.

She plasters herself all over her man, or cuts past Brian with a nasty glare and a jeer and Brian has to fight to keep her mouth shut. There’s a comment about possessiveness and insecurity that’s just begging to spill out onto the concrete. It’d probably end in a cat fight, except for the part where neither of them fights in a typically female way.

Brian’s about to say screw it and go _through_ the other woman, when the call goes up. A bust.

It’s not part of her plan and definitely not something Tanner organized, but she can make this work. Maybe.

She trails Toretto and when things get tight for him, she rides in, all damsel in shining armor. Or knight in shining car. Something like that, anyway. She saves his ass.

And then it all turns out to be for nothing when the nuts on the crotch rockets hijack them and make them follow them to the butt-end of some industrial area. Far from anyone else. Nice. And they have pretty big guns. Even nicer.

They’re rolling to a stop when Toretto starts hissing out of the corner of his mouth, “Ignore anything they say. Pretend you don’t know me at all and say it’s your car if they ask. Play it cool and don’t let either of them get close.”

She nods, quick and short and that is all she has time for before they stop and climb out of the car. Toretto introduces Johnny Tran and his cousin Lance and Brian looks at them as blandly as she can and pretends she can’t feel their leers like a weight on her skin. She regrets wearing something tighter than her usual loose t-shirts tonight and fights the urge to pull her jacket closed around her.

Johnny talks big at Toretto, but he keeps his eyes on her the whole time, undressing her mentally. She fights to stand still and ignore him and mostly manages until his cousin surprises her. He comes up to her from behind, puts a hand on her tit and squeezes. It’s a brief touch, there and gone, and it makes her want to rip his dick off and feed it to him.

 _Don’t_ , she tells herself. _Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t fuck this up._ She hears Toretto say something, aggressive, loud. He’s distracting them, giving her time to pull her shit together. Drawing the attention onto himself. She’s ridiculously grateful, even if it’s his fault they’re here in the first place.

After a few beats, she spins on her heel to face the asshole, conveniently taking a step back as she does, smiles artificially, says, “Babe, I don’t put out before the third date.”

She cocks her hip, bites her lip, plays it coy and easy. It works. Tran laughs and his cousin steps back.

“That’s a cocky whore you found yourself, Dom.”

Toretto shrugs, says nothing. Man’s a fucking steel trap and Brian would really appreciate someone throwing some kind of clue her way right about now.

She waits a beat, but, predictably, it doesn’t happen. The men keep slinging shit for another few minutes and all she has to do is keep distance between her and the groper and not freak the fuck out because she can still feel his hand on her, even through two layers of cloth.

They leave, and that’s all she notices in a blur of adrenaline. And then they come back and shoot up the car and fuck, the NOS, the fucking NOS. The car blows. Tanner will not be pleased, Brian thinks, oddly detached, as she sits her ass on the dirty concrete twenty feet from the car and relearns how to breathe.

 _Danger is over_ , she tells her system, which happily keeps pumping adrenaline through her veins. She jumps about seven feet high when Toretto comes at her from a bad angle, invisible until he’s practically on top of her.

“You okay?” he asks when she comes back down, scrambles to her feet.

“Fine,” she tries to snarl, but it comes out shaky. “Fucking fantastic. What the hell, Toretto?”

“Long story,” he tries to placate, reaching out a hand to probably pat her shoulder or something.

She jumps again and this time the snarl works just fine. “Don’t fucking touch me!”

+

She’s fifteen and has just won her first big race when a guy she knows only from seeing his face on the street walks up to her, congratulates her. She eats it up, fifteen and stupid, and flirts clumsily back when he puts his arm around her shoulders, reels her in, whispers in her ear. He makes her feel real special.

He leads her outside, away from the party. They start making out and it’s all cool, his hands on her hips, then her waist. Her tits, and that’s still okay, until he jerks her bra to one side and fumbles for her nipples and she tries to pull back.

He catches her around the waist, presses her close, onto his dick. One hand slips into her jeans and palms her ass, squeezing. Leaving bruises.

She starts struggling, tries to hit him, but he’s too close and he won’t stop biting at her lip, groaning filth into her ear. She’s crying, even though she doesn’t notice at the time, and fighting. She’s tall for her age, tall for a girl, and scrappy, but he’s too close, holds her too tight. She doesn’t stand a chance and he’ll… he’ll… he’s going to….

He’s gone.

It takes her a second to register that fact and then there’s a sound, flesh hitting flesh, screams and Rome cussing and kicking the shit out of someone. She blinks, wipes at her mouth and tries to order her clothes at the same time, still panting, terrified.

When Rome touches her, she almost knees him in the balls before realizing who he is.

After that, she never reacts well to handsy guys.

+

Toretto pulls back, hands spread at hip-height, making himself as harmless as a guy built like a bulldozer can ever be. She appreciates it even while it pisses her off. She breathes, in, out, telling herself that she could have taken the asshole in the snake leather pants. Could have broken him to pieces.

Wouldn’t have been a victim.

Isn’t a victim.

She straightens and Toretto drops his hands. “What happened?” he asks, and it might just be her, but he almost sounds worried.

Damn it, she was supposed to be the savior here. “Long story,” she shoots right back at him.

He laughs and she finds herself smiling alongside him. “But since we have a twenty mile hike ahead of us, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

He shrugs and they fall in step next to each other, easily. “Not much to tell. Business deal that went sour. And I made the mistake of sleeping with his sister. You?”

She mirrors him again, says, “Not much to tell. Had a close call at a party when I was fifteen.”

There’s an expression on his face, half rage, half apology, and she can see him trying to find something to say. In the end, he settles for, “So. You owe me another car.”

Brian splutters. “Dude, the only reason those guys shot up that car was because it was already yours. I don’t owe you shit.”

He grins at her and it’s almost boyish. Sweet. “Oh, yes, you do. One ten-second-car, _Brian_.” Mocking.

“Man,” she defends her name, “If your parents had named you Brianna, you’d be going by Brian, too.”

They keep bantering and heckling over the car she owes all the way back to his place and somewhere along the way, he stops being Toretto and becomes Dom.

That’s probably a bad sign.

He invites her in for a beer and that’s good, that’s really good, because it means she’s _in_ , but it also sucks because…

Well, shit.

She _likes_ him.

+

Letty is back in action as soon as she lays eyes on Brian inside the house. She blocks Brian’s path, sniffs the air and smirks wickedly. “I smell skank,” she announces.

Brian tries to look nonplussed and move past her, but the chick is fast, blocking her again. “We don’t need any skanks here, skank.”

Dom, who marched into the crowded living room ahead of Brian, is suddenly back, plucking Letty’s beer from her hand and handing it to Brian, telling her to enjoy it. O-kay. Someone’s pissed.

Letty snarls, “Why’d you bring the bitch, Dom?”

He rounds on her so fast she takes an involuntary step back. “Because the _bitch_ kept me out of handcuffs! She didn’t just run for the fort!” He spins again, arms wide, including the room at large, Vince and Leon standing a few feet away. “The bitch brought me back!”

Then he looks at Brian, and while the frustration still makes his shoulders tight, the anger’s gone from his face. He raises his own beer in a silent toast and Brian meets the bottle with her own and they drink. It’s an asshole move, doing this in front of Dom’s girlfriend, even if she is a bitch. But after the night Brian’s just had, beer is the least Dominic Toretto can do for her. They _blew up her car_.

Letty stalks off to spread her mood somewhere else and Dom stomps away in the opposite direction and okay, this is Brian being left to the wolves.

Vince and Leon loom over her, both taller, even if not by much. She’s a tall girl. She expects to get the inquisition, but all that comes is Vince’s rumbled, “You saved Dom’s ass?”

She shrugs, downplays it. “Right place, right time.”

He nods gravely and then answers the question she asked weeks ago, “I like watching your ass better. Barbie.”

Leon roars with laughter.

+

That night, lying alone in bed, Brian tries to sort out all the thrills, all the shiny newold things in her life. Racing. Adrenaline. Dom. Friends. Mia. Dom. Freedom.

Dom comes up a lot, as does racing and she tries to disentangle the two, tries to figure out if she likes Dom because of what he stands for, if she’s just projecting her elation over racing again on the first guy that crossed her path after the rush of the year.

Brian’s always lied. To her mom, her teachers, the pigs. To her fellow cops, sometimes, to anyone who asked questions she didn’t want to answer. Her ability to race put her name on the list of candidates for this job, but it was her ability to bullshit with a straight face that got her in.

The first rule of lying is to make it as true as possible. The second is to never lie to yourself.

And she doesn’t.

She knows exactly who, and what, she is. Trailer trash white chick with a record, trying to make it straight and hating every minute of it, burned racer, adrenaline junkie, liar, thief, criminal in disguise.

Lost girl.

She knows herself, alright.

So when, at four in the morning, the idea of Dominic Toretto still gives her a little jolt of adrenaline, she knows she can’t tell herself it’s the racing.

It’s him.

+

Vince calls her ‘Buster’ after the night of the party and sometimes, it almost sounds fond.

+

She visits Rome back in Barstow a month before he’s busted. They have dinner, shoot the shit, talk cars. It’s as close to happy as she gets these days and when she says goodbye the next morning, she looks around the yard of his crappy place, tells him to get rid of all the hot shit he’s got stored.

“Get it off your property at least, Jesus. You’re stupid without me around.”

She can tell from the way he sets his jaw that he won’t listen to her because it’s her giving advice and Roman Pearce doesn’t take life advice from pigs. Not even this pig.

Four weeks later the cops bust his ass and there are eight hot cars in the lot.

He demands a lawyer and then shuts up. Doesn’t say a word, even when Barstow’s finest offers him a way out. They all keep grudges very well, and they want Brian O’Conner. If he can confirm that she’s dirty, that she knew about his cars and didn’t report it, they tell him, they’ll let him off easy.

She only hears about it weeks later, when IA knocks on her door, wanting to pull her life apart to see if she’s still in with her old buddy from home. There’s no evidence to link her to the cars, since she had nothing to do with them.

But she knew and didn’t say. Maybe, in a way, that makes her the dirty cop the Barstow people want her to be. Rome could reduce his sentence if he narc’ed on her. He could get off easy and he’s so pissed at her most of the time that she almost expects him to do it.

Rome doesn’t do well in cages.

But he never says a word. He protects her, always has. Even when they’re at odds, he protects her, and she knows at least some of that is because she’s a girl. He feels like he has to. Sometimes, she hates him for that. They give him three years in Chino and he doesn’t say a single fucking word to implicate her.

+

The Supra goes over better than she thought and somehow, before she knows it, she has a new job. Apparently, Dom doesn’t care about your parts, as long as you know your way around a car. She can appreciate that.

Letty drags Dom out of the garage, starts hissing and hand-waving and Brian hears ‘bitch’, hears ‘cop’ hears a lot of unflattering things before Mia brushes past her, smile on her face, says, “He owns you now.”

That should not make her as happy as it does, not by a long shot.

+

Jesse has a crush on her the size of a semi and he makes no secret of it. Or can’t, rather. He starts twitching and stuttering every time she enters a room until she gets tired of it, pulls him aside.

He wants to show her his designs for the Supra, but his hands are shaking enough that he has trouble with the computer. And he rambles on worse than Rome.

“Jesse, man,” she says, in her best bro-voice, “you gotta calm down.”

He grins at her, all boyish, dead joint dangling from the corner of his mouth. Maybe there’s a bit more to his twitchiness than just a major crush. Still, “But you are so bee-ooti-ful!”

She looks down herself, not for the first time since he settled her with the nickname of ‘Beautiful’. Oversized t-shirt, ripped jeans, old chucks. She has a nice ass from all the running she does, but her tits are too small to be worth mentioning and she’s tall, gangly. Her blonde hair is barely chin length because the curls get messy if it’s longer and her face is kind of angular. She tans nice, yeah, and she’s got those bright blue eyes, but all in all she always figured she was meant to be a boy. With a dick, she’d have been a real looker. As it is, she’s pretty, but average. Nothing for Jesse to drool over, really.

She slaps his shoulder. “You smoke too much, man, I keep telling you. Now show me what you got, genius.”

He looks hurt at the nickname, but when he sees that she’s smiling, he takes it as the compliment it was meant as and finally – thank god – settles down from strung-out-tweak to simply skipped-his-ADD-meds. She keeps smiling and nods along with everything he says and tries not to pat him on the head like a stray puppy on the street.

He gets lost in his rambling eventually, trails off until it’s clear he doesn’t need her anymore and she gets up, leaves the office.

Dom is leaning against the wall next to the door, beer in hand, apparently not doing much of anything, besides eavesdropping. She shoots him a look and marches past, grabbing her own beer and stopping at the hood of the Supra, checking out the engine. She was right when she picked the car; the engine is golden.

Dom comes to a halt next to her. “That was nice of you, letting Jesse down gently.”

She shakes her head. “Ain’t no other way to do it.”

He nods wisely, then asks, “You got plans?”

Another headshake. “I was hoping to work on the car a bit more. I get bored at home.”

Bored and itchy. The urge to run head-first into the nearest wall becomes almost unbearable when she holds still long enough to wonder what the hell she’s doing, getting in with these people like this. Talking to them, getting to know them. _Making friends with them_.

Dom puts down his Corona. “Let’s have a look at the fuel injection then, shall we?”

+

“How long you planning on running?” Rome asks, tiredly. They’ve been fighting about her leaving ever since her mom’s funeral, and at this point, he’s mostly resigned. His anger only comes in flickers anymore.

She glares at him, her eyes as cold as she can make them and says, “Forever.”

She’s told him once, about running toward and not from, about the life she planned for herself, for him. Better things. But he didn’t get it. Rome only sees one direction and he doesn’t understand that she can’t ever stop.

She can change direction but she can’t stop because if she does she’ll die.

Brian runs like she breathes and she won’t stop until the day she dies. She thought Rome understood that, but he doesn’t.

+

Whatever ideas Brian had about Letty settling down once she notices that Dom has no interest in the new girl evaporate quickly. Because for some reason, Dom seems to have an interest in her after all.

It’s weird and pretty much non-sexual – or so she thinks, but he keeps inviting her to hang out, keeps talking to her. Like she’s his best friend, when they don’t know each other from Adam. Like he wants something from her and she finds herself wanting to give it to him, even if she has no idea what it is.

In a way it’s worse than the shit she’s seen him pull at the house parties, skank on either arm. The skanks don’t mean anything and Letty knows that, but Brian… Dom _talks_ to Brian. As far as she can tell, Dom doesn’t even talk to _Vince_.

And Letty goes ballistic at least once a day. The words ‘cop’, ‘bitch’, ‘skank’ and ‘groupie’ come up so often that Brian stops reacting to them at all. Not even ‘cop’ makes her pulse speed up anymore after the first two hundred times.

Still, Brian feels bad for the younger woman, because she’s right, mostly. Brian _is_ a cop, and she _is_ here to cozy up to Dom. And if she succeeds, she _will_ rip this family apart.

Letty keeps screaming the truth from the rooftops and gets alienated for it.

At the Sunday barbeque she tries to make Dom choose, puts it down for him, Letty or Brian. And Brian cringes and looks away when Dom picks her without noticing. He shoots down his girlfriend, casual as can be, and doesn’t even notice.

There’s hurt in her eyes when Letty stalks off. Brian waits for Dom to react, but he just glowers at everyone at the table, getting awkward half-glances in return.

Brian shoves to her feet, squeezes around Vince, calls Dom a dumbass as she passes him and jogs after Letty. She shouldn’t care, but that ship’s pretty much sailed. She’s in way too deep. Might as well go for broke.

She calls the other woman’s name just as she’s about to get in her car and probably peel out making tracks. Letty glowers, but doesn’t drive off. Too much like running, Brian guesses. She’s the same. Don’t ever back down. Only she doesn’t let very much get to her in the first place and Letty is… Letty is kind of a female version of Dom, all fire and steam where Brian is ice.

“What the fuck do you want?!”

Brian screeches to a halt with her hands raised, palms out. “To apologize. Your man is behaving like an asshole and I’m sorry. But you gotta realize there’s nothing going on. I don’t do that kind of shit.”

Letty’s fingers clench like she really wants to punch Brian, but in the end she deflates and just looks tired. Maybe this isn’t the first straw. Maybe this isn’t even about Brian, in the end. Maybe all those skanks mean something after all, to Letty, to Dom.

This assignment was supposed to be easy. Get in good with thug and thug friends, make thug and thug friends confess, put thug and thug friends behind bars. Only thug turned out to have more layers than a freaking onion, and his friends are just as bad. Files on people aren’t people. Brian’s learning that pretty fast. Goddamn people. Goddamn layers.

Letty spins on her heel, stalks the rest of the way to her car, gets in. She revs the engine, then rolls down the window to get in one last shot. “I’m gonna laugh when they figure out you’re for shit.”

Then she’s gone and yep, definitely making tracks. The smell of burnt rubber stings Brian’s nose. She’s just gonna blame her headache on that.

+

She’s twelve, the first time she drives. Rome’s mom works nights and somehow, he has the brilliant idea to take her car for a little ride while she’s sleeping off a crappy shift.

At twelve, Brian is still shorter than Rome by more than a couple of inches. He’s just hit a growth spurt, too, all gangly limbs and awkwardness. And somehow, he doesn’t have those limbs under control very well. Admittedly, he has no clue what he’s doing, but still.

They barely make it three blocks before he slips on the gas, startles and jerks the car off the road. It freaks him completely and he takes his foot off the gas, lets the car coast to a stop in some weeds and shrubs.

He turns to her, wide-eyed, with that ‘oh-shit’ expression he always gets when their mad schemes go belly-up and she rolls her eyes. If you want a job done right…

She kicks him out of the car. Literally. Reaches across to pop the driver’s side door and then kicks him in the hip until he moves. She scoots over, twists and shifts until she can reach the pedals and the wheel at the same time and still look out the windshield.

Then she takes a few dry runs for practice while Rome gets in shotgun, bitching loudly. He’s freaked, she can tell that just from the volume of his complaints. She glares at him, turns the key in the ignition and then she’s _driving_.

Rome looks kind of awed when she gets them back on the road and then out of town without anyone calling the pigs down on them and she tries to keep her poker face – still a work in progress – in place, but she’s kind of in awe herself.

+

Life with the Torettos is actually kind of perfect. Working on cars, shooting the shit with friends, cold beer, no pressure. Long days and longer nights. It’s been a long time since she had anyone to hang with, to just sit around with, not doing anything.

Long time since she had friends.

The only black spots on her golden days are the meetings with Tanner and an increasingly irate Bilkins. Seriously, the man is going to give himself a heart attack if he doesn’t shift down a few gears soon.

They pick her up whenever they want something from her, drag her to Tanner’s Hollywood hideout, and rip into her for not getting results. And while they practice their good cop, bad fed spiel on her she keeps thinking stuff like, _I got a car to fix_ , or, _I need to get back to work_.

Things are shifting and somehow, before she knows it, she thinks of work at the garage as her _real_ job, and this cop thing is the temporary one, the cover. A means to an end.

What does it say about her that a gang of street racers seem more real to her after only a few weeks than being a cop does after five years?

+

“So, tell me about the others,” Brian demands. She’s curled up with Mia on the other girl’s bed, a plate of cookies and a mound of pillows between them. They’re having one of this mystical ‘girl’s night’ things that Brian’s never done in her life.

She’s pretty sure she’s subbing for Letty, who stormed off in a snit _again_ , only this time Dom followed, which means they’re probably having angry sex in a car somewhere right now.

Whatever.

Mia shrugs and wipes crumbs from her shirt. “Just family, you know?”

“How’d you all meet, then?”

She rolls her eyes. “Well, Dom and Vince grew up together, and Letty lived down the street. She’s always been into cars and naturally – “

“That meant she was into Dom as well.”

They share a giggle over that and no more is said. “Leon and Jesse just showed up one day and never left. That’s what Dom’s like,” she says, looking wistful. “He’s like gravity. Everything just gets pulled in.”

She gives Brian a significant look, but doesn’t say more. Gravity. Not a bad way to describe Dom. Not a bad way at all.

She tries to steer the conversation back on track. “So you all just… teamed up and that’s it, instant family?”

Mia nods, nibbling on another cookie. “Yeah. Sort of. I mean, there’s trouble, as you know,” she smirks at Brian, who tries not to squirm. Letty’s and Dom’s fights are becoming legend and everyone knows who causes them. “But in the end, we stick together.”

“Must be nice,” Brian mutters before her head catches up with her mouth. She didn’t mean to say that out loud. Didn’t even mean to _think_ that. She grabs another cookie, hopes that Mia will let it go and pretends to be mesmerized by the taste of chocolate chips on her tongue.

“You don’t have family?” Pity. Brian _hates_ pity.

She looks up, trying hard not to glare. “I do just fine on my own.”

Mia backs off immediately. “Never said you didn’t. Just… you got us now, alright?”

This time, Brian doesn’t look up again. She fixes her gaze on the bedspread and keeps it there for a long time.

+

Mia calls Brian ‘Girlfriend’ sometimes, with an easy grin on her face, like they’ve been painting each other’s toenails since junior high.

Brian can never quite indentify the squirming in her gut when she hears that nickname. It’s either happiness or guilt. Knowing herself, probably both.

+

There’s another heist and Tanner and Bilkins stop practicing their routine on her and seriously get on her ass. She needs to give them something or she’s out. Give them something, or they send a SWAT team to the Toretto house.

They’d kick down the doors, front and back, storm the place, force everyone flat on their bellies. There’d be screaming and barking of orders and Dom and Vince both wouldn’t lie down without a fight. Someone would shoot. Someone would get hurt.

Brian can’t let that happen, for reasons she very carefully doesn’t analyze.

Hector’s order at _The Racer’s Edge_ comes like a godsend. Brian is sure it isn’t him because she can read people and Hector was being serious when he told her about going legit. But. The order is enough. It’s something to throw to the hounds.

They’ll raid the garage, find nothing. Buy her time.

Time for what exactly?

+

She has the order, but she figures the more she has, the better this will look, so she breaks into Hector’s place. Not one of her best ideas and there’s a moment where her heart almost stops because he lock-picking skills are rustier than she thought and there are headlights suddenly and shit, fuck, oh god, and then she’s in.

 _Breathe, O’Conner. Just breathe._

She finds cars, but not the right kind, not black, wrong tires. A few guns that’ll not actually get anyone locked up. Some dope. All small time stuff. She feels a bit better, knowing that if she uses Hector as a decoy, he won’t suffer from it.

Also, wow. When did busting criminals become a mean thing to do? This is all so screwed up.

She lets herself back out the way she came in, leaving behind no trace of her presence. She’s not stupid after all. The fact that she comes out the side door is the only reason she sees Vince before he knocks her out with the butt of the shotgun he’s carrying. The man looks like a pissed-off grizzly as he cocks the gun, aims at her. Center mass. No getting away. Slowly, Brian raises her hands.

“What the fuck, Vince?” she asks, trying to sound like she isn’t the one doing incriminating things in the middle of the night. Hector may be right about her. White and cold. She actually manages to pull it off. The shotgun wavers a bit.

Then Vince shakes his head and motions her forward, “You got some explaining to do, Buster,” he snaps. “Now move, or I knock your ass out and drag you.”

He leads her around the building at gunpoint, not saying another word. Brian appreciates the silence since it gives her time to try and come up with a story that’ll get her ass out of this junk yard alive. She still doesn’t have anything solid when Vince’s big hand lands on her shoulder, shoving her forward.

She lands on her knees and hands, feels skin split against the rough ground and bites her lip as she rolls herself so she’s sitting on her ass. She wipes her knees off, glaring at Vince for all she’s worth when Dom steps out of the shadows, arms crossed, not looking happy at all.

Well, shit. Bad just got worse. Dom is a lot less gullible than Vince.

She ignores both men for a moment as she finishes wiping her knees and then picks some pebbles out of her palms. “If that scars, I’ll kick your ass,” she informs Vince.

It’s kind of funny, how he actually looks abashed for a moment, before remembering what he caught her at. Dom, who looks half angry, half amused, asks, “You better have a damn good explanation for this, Brian.”

 _Yeah,_ Brian thinks, _I better_. Before she can open her mouth and let the bullshit flow, Vince jerks the shotgun her way. “Man, maybe Letty’s right,” he says, “Maybe she is a fucking cop.”

“Whoa,” she cuts that off right there. “Dom,” she turns to him. “You know I can’t afford to lose again. Race Wars, man. I was checking out the competition.” And then she lets her mouth run, rattling off what she saw, what Hector ordered, what he might do with the parts, how to install them. On and on and on, a smoke screen of words. Until she ends with, “He won’t even know I was in there. It’s cool. Now take that damn gun out of my face.”

She doesn’t yell. Cool. Ice.

Vince puts down the shotgun on Dom’s nod, but he doesn’t look convinced. Dom goes in for the kill. “Are you a cop, Brian?”

She wants to say no. She really does. But she can’t. She can’t look him in the eye, lie to his face. She hasn’t lied yet, and somehow she can’t start now. He got the fake name and the Arizona thing from her license. She didn’t tell him. And the part about being a cop was simply a matter of not saying anything. Until now. Now he wants to have a straight up lie from her and she can’t say it. The words just won’t come.

All she can do is sit there, her bleeding palms resting on her knees, staring up at him, numbly, hoping he’ll see in her face whatever he wants to see.

It’s ironic, she thinks, that the first time her lies fail her, is the one time that really matters. She has no doubt that Vince’s gun is loaded.

 _Open your mouth_ , she orders herself. _Say no. Two letters. Just say it. It’s not hard._

Nothing comes.

She just keeps staring at Dom and he stares right back.

Suddenly he reaches out, grabs her forearm and pulls her to her feet. “You planning on checking out every garage in this town?”

+

The cop in Brian wants to throw herself out there, stop the Tran psychos from torturing their fence.

The human in Brian wants to throw herself out there, stop the Tran psychos from torturing their fence.

The girl in Brian wants to close her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears, pretending not to see. She can take violence. She can even deal it, when she has to. But this is… this is _vicious_ to a degree that makes her squirm. It doesn’t help that one of the psychos is the guy that groped her only a few weeks ago.

Then Dom’s hand settles on her neck, heavy and hot and sweaty and she should hate it, should shove it off, but she feels herself settling under his touch, like a nervous horse. He waits for a few beats, then uses the noise-cover of the fence retching to shove himself forward.

Anyone coming their way has to go through him now, before they get to her. He’s protecting her.

She waits for the usual rage to settle in at that thought, but it doesn’t come. Mostly, she’s grateful.

+

It’s almost sunrise when Dom, Vince and Jesse drop her off at Harry’s. She expects them to peel out of the lot like the devil’s on their six. All of them are slightly more shaken than they’re letting on by just how psychotic the Trans are and Brian knows, from the looks Dom keeps giving her, that he remembers her reaction to Lance’s wandering hands.

She pulls down the ice façade, plays it cooler than she ever has and studiously picks imaginary dirt out of her palms the entire ride back.

Nobody talks.

But once she’s out of the car, Dom suddenly shoves his head out the open window, asks, “You gonna be okay?”

She nods. “Sure, man.”

As long as she doesn’t ever end up alone with either of those whack jobs, she’ll be just golden. Dom nods back and Jesse takes them home.

She goes inside, locks the door behind her twice and strips out of her torn jeans painfully. She doesn’t mind the holes so much, but the edges are crusted with blood and it’s dried and sticks to the scabs painfully. Ouch. In the end, she kicks the jeans off viciously, showers for way too long and then pours half a bottle of disinfectant over her hands and knees. She considers bathing in it for a moment, cleaning herself of what she just saw. The only thing that keeps her from actually doing it is the fact that she doesn’t have more than that one bottle.

She pulls on a tank top and sweats, way too warm for LA summer nights, but barely enough armor tonight, and slips into her crappy bed.

Her palms still sting and she lies carefully on her back, hands open on either side of her. She thinks about everything that happened tonight.

About Vince with a shotgun, about the question of whether or not she’s a cop. About her answer, about Dom’s cold gaze, about his hand on her neck. About the Trans, their cars, and how they, too, have the wrong tires. She thinks about why she was at Hector’s place to begin with, how she spends more time at Dom’s and Mia’s place than anywhere else and about how Rome would laugh at her if he could see her now. She thinks about her mother saying, “You be good, Brianna,” and trying so hard it hurts.

She thinks about five years as a cop and three weeks as Dom’s mechanic and she decides that it’s time to stop kidding herself.

Brian lies to everyone, but not herself.

When the sun comes up, she gives the Trans to the cops and heads into work.

+

Files on people are not people, she thinks, as she curls into herself, listening to Dom spill his guts, blood and all, onto the concrete floor between them. Kenny Linder, racing, his dad. The life ban, the quarter mile races.

He doesn’t care, he says, and she wants to look away and can’t because, in that moment, he’s the most real thing she’s ever seen.

“From,” she whispers, mostly to herself, but he hears.

She watches as he wipes his face clean of emotion and asks, “What’s that?”

She shakes her head, doesn’t want to explain, but he simply waits and eventually she does. “What’s the first question you ask a runner?”

Dom rubs a hand over his scalp and takes a few steps towards her, until he’s standing practically on top of her. She doesn’t mind. “No idea.”

“You ask, ‘Are you running from or towards?’ You’re running from.”

He laughs half-heartedly, not meeting her gaze. “Yeah, probably.”

Brian says nothing and he sits down next to her on the footlocker she made her seat. It’s a tight fit and he squeezes against her too tightly. He’s hot and solid and still, she thinks, the most real thing she’s ever seen. He might always have been.

“Which way you going, then, Bri?”

She’s still hugging herself when she says, “I keep telling everyone that I’m running towards, but lately…”

Can you run from and towards at the same time? Or is it all only a matter of degree? Maybe she’s fooling herself and there’s no difference at all. Maybe she should just run for the sake of running, like driving a race for nothing but the thrill. No money, no quarter mile. Just a car and a stretch of road.

Running, neither from nor towards.

Now there’s a concept.

Dom is silent for a long time.

+

Pick a family, Tanner tells her, in his Hollywood house, with his Hollywood zen bullshit.

Pick a family.

Any family.

Just make sure it’s the right one.

What the fuck gave him the impression that Brian even knows what ‘right’ looks like?

+

Popping the Supra’s cherry is quite possibly the most fun Brian has had in years. A fast car, an open road, and Dom’s quiet and relaxed presence riding shotgun.

It’s good. It’s damn good. They talk, occasionally, about changes they think they still need to make to the car, things they need to check. Dom makes a few notes and Brian enjoys the feeling of the wind messing up her hair beyond recognition. She’s going to look like the eighties gone wrong whenever they get to where they’re going.

Ask her if she minds. She has a scrunchy somewhere in her pockets. It’ll do.

They pull up next to a cocky midlife crisis poster boy in a Ferrari and the guy talks shit at Dom for letting a girl drive his matchbox car, blah, blah. Dom raises one of those killer eyebrows, looks at Brian and simply says, “Smoke ‘em.”

And Brian does. She laughs like a hyena until they pull up to a restaurant by the beach for lunch.

They get shrimp baskets and a coke each and Dom asks her what’s wrong. She shakes her head, brushes him off and tries to put the put-down she got from Tanner out of her mind. They couldn’t make anything stick to the Trans and Brian is as good a target for a couple of frustrated LEOs as anyone.

Dom doesn’t buy it, tells her to keep her cool. It’s her mealticket. Which brings them to how he’s paying for her food and it’s her opening. She could get in on this comment, could talk about money, making money, extra cash. Wanting in on whatever he’s got going. Squeeze him for something solid, finally.

She could.

But she made her decision the night she gave the Trans to the cops.

Instead she frowns at him over the edge of her sunglasses and asks, “Is this your screwed up idea of a date, man?”

“Hell, no,” he answers around a mouthful of soda, half-glaring. Might just be the sunlight. “I look after my people.”

Someone’s being defensive. Brian shakes her head. _He owns you now_ don’t actually make it so. “I’m not one of your people, Dom. I pay my own way and I save my own ass. So don’t even start.”

She’s sure, of course, that he’ll start anyway, because that’s what Dom _does_ , and he takes looking after people two steps too far, always. But he surprises her when he more or less buries his nose in his shrimp basket and says, without looking at her, “I know.”

She washes her smartass comment down with come coke and starts picking at her shrimps, watching the beach babes strutting past outside. She’s mentally tagging them, real or fake, naturally pretty or doctor’s pretty. Most of them come up tricked out like the Supra in the parking lot. It makes her feel ugly and vindicated at the same time.

How the hell is it that her mark, the man she’s supposed to _bring down_ , just _gets_ her, when no-one else ever has?

Then Dom says, “You don’t want anything from me,” and she forgets all about other women’s tits.

“What?”

He’s full out glaring now, for making him repeat himself. “You don’t want anything from me.”

She shrugs and nods, because it’s true. She doesn’t. She _should_ , but Brian’s never been good at shoulds. But everyone else in his life depends on Dom in some way. Protection, guidance, love, planning, work, money, food, advice, sex. Everyone wants a piece of Dominic Toretto and she doesn’t.

Maybe that’s why the guy just seems to open up around her like they’re buddies since kindergarten.

It hurts, knowing all she knows about him, understanding him, and knowing that one day, he will hate her. Because no amount of self-delusion could make her believe that this will be okay, that somehow, they’ll come out of this mess intact and as they are now. Either Team Toretto goes down, or Brian O’Conner does.

The way she refuses to think the whole thing through probably falls under the category ‘from’. There’s a whole lot more ‘from’ than ‘toward’ going around lately.

+

“How long your planning on running?” Rome asked.

She answered, “Forever.”

But she thinks that might not be true anymore. Lately, the road’s been lonelier than ever. But stopping… stopping’s never an option.

+

“Do you ever wish that things would just… go away?” she asks on the way back. It’s getting dark outside already and Dom’s driving. She’s nestles into the passenger seat, her legs pulled up, face buried in her knees. She’s feeling strangely off kilter, after lunch and that conversation, after watching women with fake tits and listening to Dom cut his heart out for her, just a bit. There’s no badge here, now, no Letty, no duties, no truck heists. Nothing between them but static-y space.

He snorts but doesn’t answer because, yeah, he does. He wishes all the time. With every quarter mile he races, he wishes for things to fall away. _Makes_ them fall away, for just a second.

 _Ten seconds._

She thinks she might have been more right than she thought, when she told Mia that Dom’s a complicated man.

The dark makes it easy to say, “I keep fucking people over. My mom, my best friend. Everyone I love, I fuck over. Keeps happening. And I keep running. I think I just want to…”

“Stop?” he suggests into the silence when she trails off. He’s just cruising along now, one hand on his thigh, the other on the wheel, relaxed, almost open. He doesn’t look at her, though, and she’s grateful, even as she laughs his suggestion off.

“Stop? Hell, no. I stop, I think I’d die. I guess,” she spreads her fingers, palms up, “I just want to find a better way to run.”

Dom laughs, hard and sharp, and his free hand finds hers between the seats. He holds it, squeezes it, and says, bitterly, “Good luck with that, Bri.”

She snorts a little laugh of her own, nods into her knees. “Yeah,” she agrees.

God. A cop and a mark, on a dark street at night, talking about life and dreams and futures they’ll never have. It sounds like a joke. Helluva punchline, too.

+

Dom calls her ‘Bri’.

He’s the first one since Rome who dares.

He’s the only one she lets.

+

It’s midnight by the time they get back to the city and Brian realizes, surprised, that they’ve just wasted an entire day together, doing absolutely nothing. They haven’t even talked all that much, even though it feels like they’ve both spilled their guts.

Dom drops her at Harry’s, telling her he’ll come by, or send Jesse in the morning, to pick her up. Her truck’s still at the garage and she just nods, the logistics seeming far removed. Unimportant.

He realizes she’s not listening and kills the engine. She feels bereft without the car’s purr and blames it on the late hour, on the surreal quality of the entire day.

So screwed up.

Dom leans into her space, suddenly, puts one of those big hands on her shoulder and slides it around, rests it on her neck again. Proprietary. She’s not one of his, but he claims her anyway. Kisses her. He tastes like she half-expected him to, hot, sharp, a hint of engine grease and motor oil, like it’s sunk into his skin, into his very being.

She pushes into him, wraps her arms around his neck and feels threatened and amazed at how she utterly fails to move him. His free hand finds her thigh, edges up to her waistband and under her shirt. It leaves trails, like sun-hot metal, enough to burn. She’s wearing a sports bra and his hand finds the edge of it, slips under, palming her. She arches her back and bites his lip, pulling it taut and letting it snap free.

She jerks at him then, trying to pull him down, but he resists her, jerks his way instead. She tumbles into his lap and there’s no getting away, no room to breathe. The hand on her neck becomes a steel band around her back and she gasps, grinds down on his lap almost brutally, almost enough to hurt. Too many seams between her and him, too much rough denim.

He pulls her closer still, like he’s trying to pull her inside and keep her there, his fingers digging into her skin in return, pushing and pulling and demanding. He bites at her lips, licks into her mouth, open hot and sloppy and hungry.

Too hungry.

Sun-hot metal and hunger and she tastes copper, somewhere in there, copper and bruises and she grinds herself into him so hard it takes her breath away.

Then she unlocks her arms from around his neck, grabs his ear, twists hard. His surprise makes him let go and she scrambles out of the car before he can utter a single sound of protest.

The next morning Letty yells at Dom for being gone all day. They pretend nothing happened. Maybe it didn’t.

+

The punchline goes like this:

She clears out the competition at Race Wars, absolutely dominating, like Jesse said she would.

And then Jesse’s suddenly gone with a car that doesn’t belong to him anymore, and the rest of the crew disappears in the middle of the night, off to get their asses killed by a pissed-off, armed trucker.

 _Fuck._

Brian finds Mia as the younger woman meanders back to their little corner of the place, grabs her by the arm. She tells her. Tells her everything. How they’re in danger, how the truckers are arming up, how she can help, how they need to find them. Tells Mia how she’s a cop.

“You _bitch_ , Mia snarls.

But she gets in the car. Brian counts that as a win and doesn’t say anything else for a long time.

+

The truck. Shotgun. Vince. Jump wire, goddamnit, in his arm, digging in so deeply she thinks she’ll never get him free. Mia screaming, the trucker reloading, the wind whipping at her, the road screaming under her, way too close. Blood. Jesus, the blood.

A lucky shot, a few inches, that’s all that separates her from certain death and she doesn’t even have time to _think_ about it, except for a brief _if I die here, I’ll be so pissed_.

She thinks she hears Dom screaming, but that must be her imagination because he fell behind miles ago, his car spitting steam. But Mia’s still screaming and Vince is moaning and she slaps him, hard.

“Vince,” she yells against the wind, “Listen to me, damn it! I can’t throw your fat ass. You gotta jump!”

Somehow, miraculously, he does. Half dead, a ton of buckshot in him, his arm fucked to hell and he manages to land in the Supra. Thank you, god.

Brian jumps after and lands hard, feels hips bruise, ribs maybe crack. Shit, shit, shit. The truck clips the car and Mia almost doesn’t manage to keep them flat.

Silence.

Dust.

The others are there suddenly and Brian is fumbling for her phone with slick fingers, blood, so much blood.

And then she says the words, says, “Officer O’Conner,” and she can see in Dom’s eyes that it’s all gone.

It’s all over.

Letty, injured and biting back tears, starts screaming immediately, _fucking pig, fucking pig_ , over and over and over. Leon has to grab her, pull her away. Brian doesn’t hear.

She just keeps pressing her jacket to Vince’s side, keeps staring at Dom, her mind curiously empty.

She might look at Mia, might see a flash of pity in her eyes, but she can’t. Dom’s the only thing she can look at, no matter how much she wants to look away. She tries to will him to understand, tries to beg forgiveness.

 _You own me_ , she wants to yell.

But the words filling her mouth are the echo of a conversation that seems a million miles away. _I keep fucking people over._

She thinks, ridiculously, that she should have told him that she didn’t stop kissing him because she didn’t want him, or because it was wrong. Not because she’s a cop, because she hasn’t really been one in a while. It wasn’t even about Letty, not really.

She did it because she knew he’d hate her even more when he found out. She was trying to buy herself points, to earn forgiveness not yet needed.

She’s pathetic.

The chopper comes, takes Vince away, and then the others leave. One, two, three four. All the people that matter in her life, gone. Just like everyone else. Their cutout shapes slot into place next to Rome’s in her heart and that’s ridiculous, too, because she’s only known them for weeks, practically no time at all.

And now they’re gone.

+

She sits in a drying puddle of Vince’s blood until the dust settles, then climbs to her feet, gets in the Supra, starts driving. She stops at the wreck of the first Honda.

It’s a matter of moments to pull gas from the tank and pour it on the seats. She’s crying as she lights the thing on fire and she doesn’t stop until she’s burned the second wreck, too.

No evidence to link the crew to the crimes.

She just fucked herself out of a job as well as her family, but it really doesn’t matter anymore. Rome was right. She makes a shitty cop. More than that, she makes a shitty person. But at least she knows who she is now.

And she knows that she’s been running from all along, lying to herself the whole time.

 _You be good_ , her mother said.

For the first time, Brian answers, _I tried, Mom, and I suck at it._

It’s time to do things her way.

+

She should cut her losses and run. She’s not just out of a job, she’s probably going to be more wanted than any of the crew if the cops ever figure out what she just did.

But.

She drives to the Toretto home instead, finds Dom with a shotgun and murder in his eyes. They yell at each other, nonsensically, until Dom says, “Jesse.”

Shame runs down her spine, ice-cold. How the hell did she manage to forget about Jesse?

Okay.

Okay.

“Put the gun down,” she tells Dom, for what feels like the hundredth time.

“Are you listening to me? I have to find Jesse!” Screaming. She understands, possibly for the first time, what Kenny Linder must have seen when Dom went after him. His death with dark eyes.

If Dom snaps on her now, she’s dead. She might get lucky, get off a shot, kill him, too, but she’s dead anyway. And still she screams back, right in his face. “And we will! But I just fucked myself out of a life to keep you and the others out of fucking jail and you are _not_ going to ruin that by running around with a shotgun and shooting up Johnny Fucking Tran! Is. That. Clear?!”

He looks at her, almost dumbly, and she takes that as permission to go on. “We’ll find him. We’ll deal with Tran. But we’ll do it with _my_ gun and _my badge_ and you are going to _put that fucking gun down!_ Fuck!”

Possibly the longest, filthiest tirade she’s ever let loose. But hey, it seems to work, because he’s putting down the gun and on the porch, Mia looks impossibly relieved.

Brian nods to herself, exhales, puts up her gun. Some of the murder fades from Dom’s expression. The rest bleeds away when Jesse’s white Jetta suddenly screeches down the street.

Relief.

The kid comes out calling apologies, tear-choked and upset, more than half-crying. Dom shoots her a look, but her screaming has broken through his rage, somehow, and he’s almost calm now. Like he’s got things under control again.

Well, that makes one of them.

He starts moving toward Jesse and there’s another sound, engines, whining sharply and growling loudly. Crotch rockets. Brian looks behind her, sees two familiar figures on bikes and then…

Brian’s spent most of her adult life teaching herself to recognize the shape of a weapon even without paying attention and a single look, now that she doesn’t have to pay attention to Dom anymore, is enough. She screams for the others to get down, down, down, just as Johnny and Lance raise their arms.

Dom goes down, Mia disappears on the porch. Jesse stands, still frozen, still babbling apologies. Brian doesn’t even think. She runs, full throttle, slamming into him just as the first shots ring out.

They hit the ground, Jesse first with a choked scream, her on top of him and for one moment, hidden behind the car, Brian thinks _safe_.

Jesse grins dopily up at her, confused, afraid, relieved. There seems to be a lot of that going around lately. The shots still ring out, but they’re growing less already, fading out. One thing to say about drive-bys: They’re over fast.

Brian grins at the kid she’s lying on and when the last shot has faded away, leaving only the stench of burnt rubber and metal, she tries to roll off him.

She can’t move.

Jesse is frowning suddenly, brings up a hand between them. It’s slick with blood and Brian thinks _too slow_ , until he pushes her aside, crouches over her, pressing hands to her abdomen.

That’s when she realizes that she’s the one that got shot.

Oh.

Dom is there above her, Mia, too, and it’s like it was less than two hours ago, only this time she’s taking Vince’s place, on the ground, bleeding out. Shit, shit, shit.

Someone is putting pressure on the wound and Mia is talking and it feels like they’ve all got their hands _inside of her_ and she wonders how she didn’t feel the pain before because now she can’t remember ever not feeling it.

She tries to raise her hand, fails, tries again. Dom gets it eventually, grabs her hand, looks at her. He’s talking nonsense and she shakes her head. “Don’t talk,” she says, fast and slurred. She needs to say this and she’s pretty sure she needs to hurry. Blackness is already creeping in. “I burned the cars. Don’t say anything, they can’t pin anything on you. Say,” she coughs and there’s blood on her lips, in her mouth. Jesse curses, freaking out. She almost smiles. “Vince… say he owed money to someone. Accident. What- shit-ever. Don’t talk. Trucker won’t…”

Dom says something like, “Don’t worry.” Maybe.

She can’t really hear him anymore.

+

Brian’s first thought upon waking to the steady _beep, beep_ of her own heartbeat is, _wow. Not dead after all._

She tries to say it out loud, but all that comes out is a groan. Someone squeezes her hand and she blinks long enough to make out Jesse’s face, corpse white against the neon backdrop of the ceiling lights. He grins at her, almost bouncing with nervous energy and starts talking.

She doesn’t catch a word of what he says before she goes under again.

+

They say she was lucky. They say she’s a hero. They say she’ll be here for a few more weeks and then months of recovery.

She tells them it doesn’t matter much, since she burned her life out by the highway. Tanner and Bilkins come and go, yelling at her, asking too many questions. She tells the half-invented lie she came up with on the ride back into the city, sticks to being as vague as possible, so as not to contradict what the others might have said.

It seems to work.

Mostly. They know she’s lying, know the story’s hinky as all get out, but they can’t do shit about it. Evidence gone, the trucker never came forward. They have nothing. Her gun is already gone to ballistics although she never fired it and her badge is at home. She tells Tanner to collect it.

“Let’s face it, Sarge,” she says, as soon as she feels capable of speech again. Her words still slur a bit from the good drugs and her lungs burn. “I was never a very good cop.”

He looks at her like he’s the one hurting, but nods. Leaves. Bilkins keeps coming back and screaming as her until the nurses kick him out. It’s almost amusing, but it’s cutting into the two hours or so of awake time she has every day and that just won’t do.

Jesse comes every day, or at least she assumes he does. He’s always there when she’s awake, twitching at the edge of her bed, rambling on about cars, about how he’s fixing up the Jetta and bullet holes are a bitch to fix. That makes her laugh and that hurts like hell and he apologizes for half an hour.

He keeps bringing her flowers with thank you cards, for saving his life. She tells him to stop with the shrubs. He can design her cars for the rest of her days instead. It’s a joke, but the way he nods makes her think maybe he didn’t catch that part.

After a week – she just made it to the bathroom on her own for the first time, talk about _pride_ \- she tells him, “Jesse, man, you can’t keep coming around all the time.”

He looks at her, owlishly. She thinks he might not smoke any pot before he comes to visit her, just so he’s clearer. That, more than anything, tells her she’s got his undying devotion. All it took was getting plugged in the gut. It’s a trick to remember. “Why?”

“Dom’s not going to be happy to know you keep hanging around the cop bitch.”

Former, she corrects mentally. She takes the lack of pain in that to mean that she really never was much of a cop. God, Rome is going to laugh at her for _days_.

Jesse just keeps blinking and eventually tells her, “Dom’s down the hall visiting Vince. I come in with him.”

Huh. Now _that_ she has no idea what to make of.

+

Vince comes visiting at the end of week two. He’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt and walking like he’s afraid to fall over. Apparently, gutshot-and-almost-armless gets to go home earlier than gutshot-and-almost-collapsed-lung. So not fair.

He sinks into Jesse’s chair like he’s run a marathon and says, “I hear I have you to thank for being alive.”

She shrugs and keeps her mouth shut.

“I also hear you lost your job saving our dumb asses. And you saved Jesse.”

This time, she turns her head away. There’s a long silence and when Vince stands, he sounds like a rising titan. She expects him to walk away. Instead he bends over her bed. “Thanks,” he whispers. “You’re okay, Buster.”

The last thing she ever expects Vince to do is kiss her temple, but he does. She closes her eyes and pretends to have spontaneously fallen asleep, a sort of reverse Sleeping Beauty thing. He lets her have the illusion and walks out. If he notices she’s crying, he doesn’t say.

Maybe she hasn’t lost everything. Maybe this time, things will be alright. She calls the feeling in her gut hope and thinks that maybe, she’s more tired of lonely roads than she knew.

+

Her plan for the day she gets out of the hospital is to get a taxi, climb the two flights of stairs to her apartment, hope that she doesn’t die on the way up, and then collapse into bed and not move ever again.

There is a slight hitch, in the form of Dom, waiting when a hot male nurse pushes her through the front entrance in a wheelchair she’d really kind of like to steal. He glowers at the nurse and rumbles that he’ll take it from here.

For a moment, Brian is kind of scared they’ll find her body in a ditch somewhere. But then she remembers that Dom was the one that drove Jesse up here to visit her every day for the past two weeks, and relaxes. He won’t kill her. Probably.

Which still leaves a dozen other things she can think off that he could do to her, all of them probably much worse than killing her.

But all he does is load her into the passenger seat of his car and slam the door behind her. The nurse waves goodbye. She smiles back, sort of weakly. “You taking me home?” she asks, tentatively, when Dom gets in behind the wheel.

He nods. “Where?”

She has to actually think about the directions, given that she hasn’t been there for the better part of three months. He nods to accept what she tells him and then silence falls. And falls. And falls. Until she feels like it’s blanketing her, suffocating her.

Only when she feels ready to squirm does Dom finally speak. “So,” he starts and she stills instantly, awaiting his verdict like a loyal subject. “Remember when I said Jesse can find anything about anyone on the web?”

She nods.

“Brianna Marilyn O’Conner. There’s a whole lot about you on the web.”

Brian looks out the window like LA rush hour traffic is the most interesting thing she’s ever seen. Lucky for her, Dom needs no encouragement. He just keeps talking.

“Turns out you really have a middle name like a porn star. Turns out you really are a desert rat, only Barstow instead of Arizona. Turns out your best friend really is doing time, and your mother really did die when you were twenty. Even the juvie record is real.”

He looks at her and she can see him smirk out of the corner of his eye. “You’re a really shitty undercover cop, aren’t you, Bri?”

It’s the nickname that almost does her in. She laughs, choked and short. It hurts like hell, still, but she thinks this might be Dom telling her she’s forgiven, and she just can’t stop.

He lets her laugh and half-cry until they get to her apartment complex and then he helps her up the stairs, his arm around her waist with nothing more than a soft, “C’mere.”

She unlocks the door and watches Dom take in her humble abode. It’s a single bedroom flat, dusty and mostly empty. Her clothes are still at Harry’s, she guesses. Her uniform and other police stuff is at the precinct, where it’ll stay forever.

There are a few books and movies strewn throughout the room, on the shelves. A bunch of letters on the kitchen table. Washed dishes in the dish rack. The cactus she forgot, dead on the windowsill. No pictures on the walls, no knickknacks beyond a quilt over the back of the sofa. Nothing to indicate who lives here.

Looking at it through Dom’s eyes, it’s pathetic. She’s been living here for five years and it looks like she moved in last week.

Dom walks past her into the bedroom, shuffles around in there. She sinks gingerly into the sloppy sofa and can’t find the energy to ask what he’s doing. Obviously, he’s not dumping her ass here and leaving.

She feels that insane feeling of hope again, and this time, she lets it, just a bit.

He comes back five minutes later with a duffel bag, half filled. He must have cleared out what little was left in her closet. Then he starts walking around, gathering the bits and bobs of her not-life. He leaves everything related to the police and she doesn’t mind one bit. He clears the bathroom out last and when he’s done, her whole life is stuffed into two duffel bags. The apartment came furnished. The dishes aren’t hers. He folds the quilt over one arm and motions for her to get up.

She doesn’t budge. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” he says.

Brian probably should have guessed that, from watching what he was doing. She’s going to blame being slow on the drugs. “No,” she says, “No way in hell. I told you, I am not one of your people, Dom.”

He shrugs her off, standing by the door, seemingly endlessly patient. She wonders how long it’ll last. She can accept that he’s forgiven her betrayal, but moving her in with him? No way in hell.

“Got your blood on our front yard. That makes you family, Bri. Besides, we’re already putting up Vince. One more invalid shuffling through the house won’t matter.”

Feeling smug, she points out, “If Vince is there, then there’s no more room for me.”

Leon and Jesse more or less live in the basement, Mia and Dom have a room each, Letty shares with Dom, leaving a guest room for Vince.

“You’ll stay in my room.” Like he planned it all out. Bastard. She clutches one of the sofa cushions close, like it’s going to keep her here.

“Letty won’t like that.”

His expression sours. “Letty’s gone. Leon went with her.”

“I… _what_? Why? Not because…” Because Letty was right and Dom didn’t listen, because, somehow, he still picked Brian despite everything she did, because of the heists and the fallout because of… what?

Dom hears all the questions and finally puts down the bags. He sits on one of her two kitchen chairs and folds his arms over his stomach, almost serene. Then he asks, without looking, “You ever look at someone and know you don’t love ‘em?”

This time she bites the laugh off before it hurts her. “Every one of my relationships ended that way.”

“Letty and me were easy. Familiar. Comfortable. We weren’t ever in love.”

Since that is possibly the most chick flick moment Dom has had in his life, Brian stays silent for a long time. Digests it. But eventually, the question asks itself. “When?”

Dom smiles, but it’s not a happy expression. “After she crashed. She told me the last job was going to go bad. I didn’t listen. I never listened to her.”

 _But for some reason, I listen to you._ He doesn’t says it, but they both hear it. She’s still not sure how the hell she managed to talk him down from his homicidal rage, back at the house, shotgun in hand. Fluke, maybe.

Probably not.

“I’m not replacing Letty for you, Dom.”

“No,” he agrees, smirking, “You’re taller.” Then the humor fades and he promises, “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

Brian knows, as she locks the door behind her, that she won’t come back. Whether she stays with Dom or not, this place was never home. It was part of this strange holding pattern she turned her life into, waiting. Pretending not to run, when it was really all she did. If nothing else, she’ll need a bigger place anyway when she arm-twists Rome into moving in with her after he gets out.

She leaves the keys in the landlord’s mailbox and doesn’t feel a shred of sadness.

+

She can’t really call Rome in Chino, because that kind of thing is a pain in the ass. But she can write him, and she does.

A post card, with a cheap ass sunrise on the front. It’s the first contact of any kind since he’s gone inside, and after hours or agonizing, all she can write is, _I miss you_.

Since he knows her better than anyone else in the world, she knows he’ll figure it out.

+

Mia forgives Brian rather quickly. Jesse and Vince are as they’ve always been and Letty and Leon are gone. They call, check in, but don’t come back. Mia says they’re most certainly hooking up, which doesn’t surprise Brian at all. Leon’s always carried a torch for Letty and Letty likes attention. They probably won’t last because Letty needs someone to fight back and Leon is a peacekeeper at heart, but if it makes them happy, whatever.

The charges against everyone and their dog get dropped. Brian did a good job fucking the investigation over and Bilkins will most certainly get that heart attack one of these days.

She’s persona non grata with pretty much every LEO in California, but she doesn’t give a shit.

She might, once she can walk further than the mailbox again without being out of breath, but for now, not so much. She and Vince spend most days vegging in front of the TV, wasting their lives and bemoaning the holes in their guts.

Dom, true to his word, sleeps on the sofa every single night.

One night, he and Brian have a weird not-conversation about the make-out session in the Supra, but it doesn’t lead anywhere and Brian feels her frustration mount with every day she feels better and Dom holds himself too still next to her.

She can feel herself getting all insecure and girly when Mia tells her, point blank, “He’s leaving it up to you, idiot. Now go and have sex already before the house blows up from the sexual frustration.”

The grimace she makes after indicates that she’s imagining her brother having sex with her new best friend. She shudders and leaves the room.

Two days later Brian nudges Dom’s shoulder when she’s tired, says, “Let’s go to bed.”

He gets the hint.

+

Rome gets out on a Monday, and she and Dom pick him up at the front gates of Chino, take him home and put him in the basement room that used to be Leon’s. He’s on parole, anklet and all, but he’s got an address and he’s got a job at the garage and after the initial pissing contest with Dom, he fits in like he’s always been there.

Brian gets her man, her best friend, her other, newer best friend, the boys, and her goddamn cake, too. She works as a mechanic, races on the weekends.

Freedom. Peace. Home. Family.

Some people give her shit for being a pig, but they grow less and less. Some people give Dom shit, about letting his woman run around with another man. He finishes that rumor at a house party.

She’s sitting in Rome’s lap like she’s been doing _all her life_ , talking to Hector, when Dom yells across the entire room, “Brian! Who you going home with tonight?”

And she promptly yells back, “You!”

After that, no-one gives her shit about snuggling up to her boy anymore.

Various other kinks work themselves out and before she knows it, Brian is _happy_.

+

“I’ve been thinking,” she tells Dom one evening in the living room. Vince and Jesse are conked out in the guestroom and Mia’s gone out with college friends. Rome is sleeping like a drooling, drunk baby with his head on Brian’s lap.

She keeps tracing patterns on his scalp to see him twitch. Dom’s been watching her for the past twenty minutes, amused and utterly unbothered by her and Rome. He’s got Vince, and that’s pretty much the same thing. Except that Rome is mouthier and can’t hold his liquor very well.

“Yeah?” He’s got an arm around her shoulders, uses it to reel her in. Her GWS barely twinges anymore when he does stuff like that.

“Yeah. About running.”

“From or towards,” he tells her, obviously remembering the conversation as well as she does.

“Exactly. Baby here,” she pats Rome’s cheek and he twitches in his sleep like a dreaming dog, “Keeps telling me I can’t run forever.”

“But you ain’t stopping,” He says, absolutely certain. She’s a racer. Of course she doesn’t stop.

“Nope. But I’m thinking maybe ‘from or towards’ is the wrong question.”

He’s patient with her, smile in his voice, “And the right one?”

“Who’re you running with?”

Who you’re running with and, maybe, if it’s running at all, when there’s someone else keeping pace, running with you all the way.

If everyone’s moving, the direction stops mattering.

A new way of running.

She’s not saying it very well, but she knows Dom gets it anyway. He pokes Rome in the side with the arm around her shoulders. “Let’s pour the pussy into bed and go for a ride.”

+

“The Supra?”

Dom shakes his head, tucks Brian under his arm, steers her up the drive. “Let’s take the Charger.”

Freedom. Peace. Home. Family.

Running, neither from nor towards, but simply for the wind in your hair and the heat in your veins.

Running for the sake of running.

You can stop when you’re dead.

+

 _You be good, Brianna._

 _I am, Mom._

+

The End

+

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me something?


End file.
